sigh, how can SE not see that they are just throwing more gas on the fire with this blog post? Even if the Loop really does meet everyone's needs, the way they are going about it is almost calculated to trigger loss aversion.

:8082251 so? you claim it is not a dupe and the problem is different from what is mentioned in the question, based on what you said in the chat transcript. Edit it then to make clear what is asked or at least that it matches with your and the other answers.

@mag I'm not sure about 'getting rid of it' either... It's going to change, be replaced perhaps... but 'getting rid of' sounds like you'd get nothing else in place, which I refuse to believe and is not the impression I get from a quick read through the blog post.

@rockwalrus-stopharmingMonica Well, that's perhaps not a bad thing. Out of several big 'subjective' sites, each handles e.g. backup requirements in their own way. A more even approach there might mean less IPS vs TWP fights ;)

"We’ve observed that systems that used to work when we had 50,000 users don’t work as well now when we have 50 million coders asking questions and teaching others on our platform. "

we have too many users 'just hanging around' - that's annoying and costly - so we will fire the noisest ones into the sun.

"We are striving to:

create an experience that works for all users show everyone how we think about serving the larger developer and technical community be clear about the “why” behind our decisions"

Explaining stuff on meta doesn't work, because you nasty people tell us we are wrong.

2

"A month ago we formed cross-functional teams of Stackers (employees of Stack Overflow) to create strategies to start addressing some of these concerns. It’s been inspiring to see people from our Community Management team work hand in hand with folks from Engineering, Sales, and Marketing to come up with solutions for our community’s most pressing concerns."

"We’ll hand-select folks of diverse backgrounds who are excited to chat with us regularly about everything from new ideas to features, to how we communicate with the broader Stack Overflow community." Seriously? Listening to a bunch of people you hand-select isn't going to give you unbiased community feedback!

@djsmiley2k-CoW Okay, I did reach that part. I don't think it's about firing the noisiest users into the sun... I thought that referred to the part on community debt that came after: both with the communication, but also referring to the moderator tools and the closed questiosn bit.

> Overall, both anonymous and registered users are highly satisfied with Stack Overflow and tell us that their favorite things about our community include finding solutions to their problems, vast access to information, and the knowledgeable people who participate.

It frustrates me that for years I sold the network to people I know as this awesome space for anyone to ask about dang near anything and now it's like okay yep they don't actually want to be that, so don't bother.

SE have said they believe meta has 5 main uses: Self-governance discussions, Support, Bug Reports, User Feedback, and Announcements

Four of these five are planned for migration. The only use left for meta would be self-governance discussions. While not fully elaborated on, presumably it would partially be addressed by the new moderator advisory team.

One thing to note as well, if we're talking about "unbiased community feedback" is that MSE has never been that either. MSE has never been representative of the larger network of users and never will be.

Now, the environment isn't always conducive to that, and that's an issue, but moving to even more closed platform... isn't going to make it easier for more diverse people to join, because it'll be harder for everyone to join.

@Ash It sounds like you know more about this than I. I should be clear, I mean I assume that there is a way to make a closed-group model for feedback work here. It makes sense to me, but then again that doesn't mean I'm right.

@Rubiksmoose at this scale, it's not likely to be practical for them to pursue, or likely. :( it's hard, when things are this big, to make them open and fair, but this feels like we are heading more into less open and consultative and more closed and towards what they want to the potential detriment of anything the community knows fits itself.

@Ash But has Meta ever worked on this scale either? To me it looks like one model has failed and they're trying something new. I like being a part of things as much as anyone else, but that seems reasonable to try. I've read many legitimate critiques of MSE as a system for feedback and it's certainly seriously flawed.

@Rubiksmoose oh, Meta is super flawed! It's a terrible model, and needs to be dealt with. I'm just not loving this hand selected group where I suspect a lot of the time most of us aren't ever going to hear anything except this is what you get, be happy.

I have been reading a lot lately about how different models of communication and listening to the needs of local realities can shape these sorts of things, so that's been informing a lot of my thoughts lately about how broken this whole model is. I can see how they're thinking this will help, but I suspect it's gonna keep getting worse before it gets better

@BryanKrause Well it's not a useful place to collect feedback currently. At least not feedback that is supposed to represent the whole community. That certainly doesn't mean there's nothing to learn or nothing of value here, but it is clear that various factors (size, attitudes of company towards meta and vice versa, trust, Q&A format itself) is hampering MSE greatly.

@fbueckert there has been good at the core of it, mostly, but the implementation has been very alienating. It isn't a good community building praxis in a lot of ways. I dont know what's better. I'm increasingly convinced that there isn't a better, for SE in its current incarnation.

@Rubiksmoose Yes, and yet a lot of the content I've seen on meta lately has been "why aren't you asking us/sharing with us?" and now "why are you silencing us" and I think the answers are kind of just staring everyone right in the face while they look the other way

There's a lot that SE needs to do better and correct but I don't see a lot of self-reckoning here that maybe a certain approach to discourse is more harmful than helpful in terms of getting the type of attention that is useful

@StevoisiaksupportsMonica I think there's a lot of good content here, but probably a lot of people not being as thoughtful as you about what they add, and a lot of echo chamber anger. A lot of the anger is justified, it just doesn't seem like the right release for it here

@StevoisiaksupportsMonica It is. And I think a part of that is because people on Meta have totally different expectations of Meta than what it currently is/can do wrt interactions with SE. In that way, the blog post is a way of setting better expectations, I guess.

@Tinkeringbell huh, well that explains at least part of the (to me) weirdly disproptionate reaction to those questions. I can see how to those that don't get asked that constantly it would seem very intrusive and unnecessary.

@Rubiksmoose It's also... If I see them, I'm like 'nope, if you don't take my opinion without knowing who I am, you're not getting it while knowing who I am so you can have your diversity brownie points'... I personally kinda dislike those. It's the same thing with e.g. American job posts, that ask you to disclose any favourable diversity points.

@Tinkeringbell The American law on those questions is weird. They're not allowed to look at those answers while doing hiring, except for the veteran status one. It's still a good idea for them to ask in order to make sure their process isn't biased and for more obscure legal reasons.

@StevoisiaksupportsMonica I mean, me neither... but I also don't want to be treated differently because people perceive me as less privileged, I'm not. I've been there, and it set me back about a year in coding skills.

And for every person that says they got an unfriendly response when asking a question here, I sure do happen to stumble on a lot of well-asked and well-answered questions when I have questions of my own

@Tinkeringbell IPS probably only works because ya'll moderate it with a heavy hand. Maybe a similar model would work for Meta but it would be a lot easier to start with that from the beginning rather than impose it after the fact

> Hey All - thanks for the feedback here we're reading through all of it. The demographic questions should not have been mandatory, the survey has been updated. Appreciate you pointing that out. – Sara Chipps♦ 2 mins ago

> In a dynamic where we essentially hold all of the cards and power, we need to give folks as much latitude as possible in order to create a field that's as level as possible. That means, we've gotta let the truth hurt, essentially, even when it's incredibly inconvenient. HOWEVER, if we can't find a trace of good faith in correspondence or it has become personal, it needs to be removed to keep the bar to entry in line with what we can take.

Hey All - thanks for the feedback here we're reading through all of it. The demographic questions should not have been mandatory, the survey has been updated. Appreciate you pointing that out. — Sara Chipps ♦4 mins ago

@mag People have been screaming at them on meta for awhile now that they need to hire someone who knows how to communicate with the community aka PR people. Not saying they've done that but... see how it's kind of hard to do what everyone wants?

@mag "the most principled ones of those resigned over recent events" I'm sure you didn't mean it this way, but this statement implies that those of us that did stay are not among the "most principled ones" which... is kind of not true?

@mag Okay... I understand, but at this point it's probably helpful to sit back and wait awhile, instead of ... this. Because that's exactly one of the things that makes it so hard for CMs to come forward.

@mag I figured you didn't mean it (and said as much), but just letting you know that you might want to phrase it better in the future. Many people that I respect have resigned, but there are plenty of highly principled and respected people still clinging to their diamonds and trying/hoping that they can help make things better.

It’s Thanksgiving in the United States this week, so we’re releasing the podcast a day early. This week we skipped the banter sessions so we could spend more time on the interview with Juan Pablo Buriticá and Brian Brennan from Splice.

Brian shares a delightful tale of the time one of his co-workers accidentally deleted the company’s database, and how they recovered it through binary transaction logs. No better way to learn than a trial by fire.

Juan explains why typing is taking over frontend development. First off, we discovered unit testing, and typecasting can make that a lot less painful. …

I'm just saying that they still stand to make money by ignoring our little civil protests in chat or meta or whatever. They let us have our storm in a teacup and know that it won't amount to much. They could be evil and still let us complain.

@Tinkeringbell there's plenty to come back to beyond MSE, but they've shown zero interest in setting things right. They like to say "can't because lawyers", but that was after five weeks of them refusing to talk with me at all. Don't believe their spin on that.

I should say there's plenty to come back to now, but if they drag this out for years I fear there won't be. Or even months. It seems like they're ignoring every opportunity to walk down the path of repair, and it's harming the communities as well as individuals.

@mag they had many, many opportunities to save face. They could still, though it might strain credibility more than it would have two months ago. But I'm not unwilling, if they do the right things. Which unfortunately I can't really talk about, but they're obvious.

Hi there. Could anyone on a computer edit meta.stackexchange.com/posts/339079/revisions to include the emphasis please? When I edit from mobile, whether from mobile or desktop view, it breaks the formatting someone else edited in :/

@IamMonica For insults sure. People sue about plain insults all the time. About an article in an obscure policy subsection of a "news website". The gofundme has more views than the article. That suit is going nowhere.

The description of a diamond moderator position is that they are responsible for moderation work on their site, such as handling flags. That's basically all they're officially required to do as part of their position.

But... in addition to that, moderators also end up moderating chat, become a go-between for their community and the company, help guide each other, and now are apparently supposed to form some sort of "council".

The "moderator" position seems to have become "non-staff member we can give lots of responsibilities" in the eyes of the company.

Now... that's not necessarily a problem. But you cannot market a position as "handle flags, it's simple" and then say "oh, and by the way, here are a dozen other things you're responsible for that we didn't tell you about" afterwards.

...I am very very slightly tempted to request my diamond back just so that I'll be in more of a position to complain about stuff like this. But I won't.

@user58 In my career, whenever I've heard a manager talk about the responsibilities of a role, or extra responsibilities, I always ask (myself, usually), "yes, but what powers come with those responsibilities". It is always a mistake to have much of one without much off the other. Go ask Superman.

Mind, mods can't function as a bridge between community and company very effectively

they're community elected, now in all cases. They don't represent the company at all

the january elections will see a swath of new mods who seriously hate the company's guts and will only do it out of love for their communities. I don't see anyone with any other messaging in their candidature winning a seat

in particular the TWP election will probably be an exercise in who can slag off SE in the most vicious way without getting disqualified. It's not really a situation that has a win state, because just not holding elections also won't work

I feel for the CMs who have to try and square the circle there, it's a really messy situation with no visible solution, and a whole lot of re-hashing will be done either way.

@user58 this is one of those moments where I’d love to be a fly on the teacher’s lounge wall. If they aren’t pissed about this I’d be surprised. Not even the announcement, but it very clearly was not done with feedback from moderators